Sketchbook: Dieseljunk

I go as Jorfik on Steam and my minor asset creation adventures prompted me to look for a suitable blogging space, so I figured Polycount would be the best spot; there's an active community, it's all about 3D games art and it's a free forum!

I'm a 'mature' engineering student and chronic half-finisher of projects so I'm mostly just doing lowpoly things for Cities: Skylines at the moment.

Any useful critiques would be welcomed, but there's a few hurdles I have with regards to my techniques as 1) A lot of sofware I'd like costs many money and 2) I have other hobbies that take my funds (but they help me relax and escape to the countryside fairly frequently so I stay sane). So software is a minor limiting factor here.

I currently just use 3DSMax (thank you student editions) and...GIMP for texturing. It just about works.

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Modeling an offshore wind turbine based mostly off the Haliade something or other because the nacelle looks interesting. It's in the region of 160m tall.For Cities: Skylines.Trying to keep the textures down to 512* 512 for the base and 1024*1024 for the turbine & tower. I think as far as C:S asset creators go I'm quite thrifty with my texture sizes (considering this asset is taller than most of the stock buildings in the game), big emphasis on re-using bits and pieces for multiple details so nothing can be too detailed or specific.

And a little look at the whole scene, sometimes I have idea and just mash them out while I'm modeling. I like the pylon to the left and think I'll reuse it for another asset. The big thing to the right is just an idea I had, I'll probably finish it as it'll be quite easy to implement.

Not had much time to fiddle with 3D recently, after landing a fairly brutal kitchen job for the time being (12 hours shifts five or six days a week, ouch). But on my past couple of days off I've refreshed my knowledge of the Cities: Skylines asset import process and got a mostly-done turbine into the game. Texture finishing and tweaks for the games lighting to follow and then we're good to go.

A couple of first person shots and some stock asset comparisons. I love the sense of scale you get going into a first person camera in building and management games. I never was a huge fan of the stock wind turbines because they lack the scale and proportions of the real life structures. A lot of the default art in skylines was a bit blobby and stylised which is a shame, because even though the graphics setup is a bit weird it's perfectly capable of doing more authentic feeling visuals (as proven by the modding community). I'm quite tempted to do a proper model of a wind turbine now, I'll have to look around for some detailed drawings.